Maintenance (Thursday Doors)

Curiosity never seems to need repairs—
not like cars, or careers, which always do.
And who could fix surprise?  Who would try?
A therapist often needs to be discarded–
and also, frequently, those rainy afternoons
that stretch endlessly into artificial lists
strewn with folly-filled patterns and pauses
that have no destination, only questions—

And then consider buildings, houses–
which seems perpetually to require repair—
doors, windows, roof, floors, walls—call the plumber!
But it is far more difficult to mend a home.
The thread that holds a home together
is fragile—it needs constant attention,
or it will fray, lose its connection—
searching for an open hand, a kind heart.

A few weeks ago I talked about all the scaffolding on the streets of NYC. I decided yesterday to record some of them I passed while walking to and from the grocery store. The top door is from a building where the scaffolding has just come down. The ground floor has been completely renovated by a photography and printing business, and they are just putting the finishing touches on the interior.

One of the local schools is having exterior work done–part of the playground is closed off by fences, gates, and scaffolding. And the apartment building across the street also seems to be having extensive work done, as part of the street is closed off.

Some scaffolds and buildings are large, some small. Some cover the entire building, some just the ground floor.

This sculpture garden is new–it’s on the crosswalk between traffic and the bike lane on Amsterdam Avenue.

Apple Bank has been scaffolded for awhile, but I think I have some photos of it from before, which I will try to find. It has some great doors. There are apartments in the upper floors.

This building on Broadway has some restaurants on the ground floor. The scaffolding makes it easy to eat outside even if it rains.

Two more scaffolds I passed on my way home.

Kim’s W3 prompt this week was to write a poem and then revise it after plugging it into the N+7 Surrealist Poetry Generator. About half the nouns in my original poem were evidently not in its dictionary, so I didn’t get that many new words to work with. I consulted the thesaurus and managed to come up with enough nouns to satisfy its constraints.

All my writing is endlessly revised, up to and even past the point I press “post”. In this case, the first stanza owes more to the N+7 suggestions than the second, but both stanzas are pretty much unrecognizable from what I originally wrote.

And of course the poem itself is only peripherally connected to this week’s doors. But if you try hard enough to see it they have a kind of relationship.

Don’t forget to check out all the doors at Thursday Doors, hosted by Dan Antion.

And I can never get enough Bonnie Raitt.